Ownership and licensing

Ownership

Ownership of research data is something that you and your research group should understand and agree upon in writing at the start of a research project. Ownership affects intellectual property rights, where data can be stored, and how data can be published and shared. Ownership can be unclear if the project involves:

University of Sydney researchers: research data produced while employed by the University of Sydney is owned by the University. The University provides the creator or collector a royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual licence to use the data for research and educational purposes.

University of Sydney students: research data produced while a student at the University of Sydney is owned by the student. The University maintains the right to assert ownership over research data produced by students.

Licensing and copyright

It is essential that you place a copyright licence on your research data if publishing and sharing data outside of the project. A copyright licence will ensure that data is attributed to you and will also apply some restrictions around how your data can be used and shared in other research. Particular care should be taken if sharing data with commercial enterprises.

The University recommends use of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike Licence 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA), however some publishers may prefer that another licence is used so you may need to check before submitting the data to a publication/repository. Details of other licences can be found on the AusGoal website.